I think you've pegged it there, because there was a bit of a dropping-in-my-stomach feeling when I got to the end of what you wrote. At first I wasn't clear what you were saying, but when you added that example at the end there was a sort of shock of recognition. Maybe I hadn't thought of it clearly in that way before, maybe it's just morning. But it's beyond frightening to me to realize that we ARE speaking two different languages, those of us in the agnostic/atheist/logic camp and the others.

There may be more to my unease with that article than exactly that, though. I'm thinking two, possibly contradictory, things:

1) I'm picturing one heroin addict telling another that he (the other) is shooting up wrong, while I'm standing beside them both asking, "but shouldn't you just not shoot up at all?" Obviously I have a pretty effed-up view of religion because I see it as being at best a set of random filters on morality. Morality is complicated enough if it's just a question of, "Will these actions hurt anyone?" or even, "Which of these actions will hurt the least people or cause the least hurt?" When you add codified moral rules that don't have anything to do with who'll be hurt by our actions, and which are in fact not grounded in anything other than the rules themselves, you're just asking for trouble. When it's okay to answer, "Why can't I do this?" with "Because God says you can't," you're creating a fucked up system that by-passes rational thought.

The guy who wrote the article seems to be pretty rational. There are religious persons all over who are very rational; what I end up not understanding about them is how they function under purely rational systems while still claiming to be part of some religious group. I can't understand the point of staying affiliated with a religion if you're admitting that the tenants of the religion are faulty. And I -think- that every rational person I've dealt with who's also been affiliated with some organized religion has had to admit to the religion's shortcomings.

This gets pretty complicated, which is what always happens when I get off on this. Let me try to get to where I was going with that, though. To me, based on my reading of the bible, Bush is the one out of those two guys (the article writer being the 2nd) who's acting like a Christian. To me "evangelical christian" is a redundant term. The bible is full of references to spreading the word of God. Ultimately I don't understand why, if a person is going to take the bible as a pretty much entirely metaphorical/not-literal text, that person continues to align himself with Christians.

You can throw out the literal interpretation of the book and pick and choose the good moral messages, but you can do that with a lot of books. It seems to me that where that path is leading is right past the organized-religion thing altogether. Make your own morality based on logical thinking about right and wrong. If you do that, why align yourself with a huge, scary cult?

2) (Yeah, I said there were two things I was thinking) Maybe religious thought CAN be harmless and helpful. Maybe I'm the one who's wrong. Maybe our rational thought is too easily overpowered by our self-interest, and so we need some irrational, animal-brain fear/guilt thing going on to be able to operate in a truly moral way. That's a pretty frightening thought, too, because it's hard for me to figure out how a person like me could get to that point.

Okay. I'm supposed to be working here. Man.